We developed the core ideas that inform this book in the fall semester of 2003 when we convened a seminar at Cornell University on “Fracturing an Integrating Europe from the Periphery? Religious Communities and Europeanization.” These sessions were part of Cornell's Mellon-Sawyer Seminar, “Toward a Transnational and Transcultural Europe,” which was sponsored by the Institute for European Studies at Cornell's Center for International Studies. We thank the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for European Studies, and the Carpenter Chair at Cornell University for the financial and logistical support of the seminar. And we thank the other members of the steering group of the seminar – Dominic Boyer, David Brown, Davydd Greenwood, and Sidney Tarrow – for their guidance and support.

A workshop hosted by Colgate University in April 2004 provided the venue for converting the conceptual and substantive discussions of our Mellon seminar into draft papers. We thank Colgate University's Center for Ethics and World Societies for the financial support that made this meeting possible. Substantial, subsequent revisions of these papers yielded a manuscript that received careful scrutiny by two anonymous readers of Cambridge University Press. We are grateful for their expert criticisms and suggestions that guided the final round of author revisions.

We would like to thank all of our authors for putting up with good humor what to them undoubtedly appeared like a never-ending cascade of email requests by their two editors imposing deadlines, suggesting changes, circulating and re-circulating drafts.